Author: Siobhan OFlynn

Hidden Histories is an ongoing digital mapping project undertaken by U of T students in CDN355 Digital Media, Makers, Canadian Studies. For Hidden Histories: Labour to Lofts 2018, students delved into the history of specific industrial buildings, all key to the development of Toronto’s economy, labour movements, neighbourhood expansion, and community development.

The five factories and two community hubs profiled here are strung out across the west and east ends, with many converted into high-end lofts. While the industries may have varied, the common thread across all these Hidden Histories is the importance each had as an industrial, economic, and social hub for those whose livelihoods and neighbourhoods were shaped by Toronto’s manufacturing boom.

Also notable for its history of social services, archival digging into buildings on Bellevue Avenue, just west of Kensington Market, revealed a remarkable cluster of community organizations, for women, children, and the homeless. St. Stephen’s Community House now occupies 91 Bellevue Ave, once home to the Nathaniel Institute, founded to convert Kensington Market’s Jewish population to Christianity.

The contrasts between then and now in cost of living, access to affordable housing, and steady long-term employment in safe workplaces, foreground the challenges many people face in Toronto today, young, old, immigrant, and families. The stories told here through archival maps, photos, City of Toronto Directory records are traces of lives lived, unmarked in official records. Very little is known of the men and women who worked, and sometimes wooed, in these buildings. They, too, were also city builders, contributing to the bones of the rapidly changing streetscape we see around us.

The Hidden Histories 2017 Project was:

Kensington Market: Hidden Histories, an geolocative history built with ArcGIS and an iOS augmented reality app, available in the Apple App store.

Canadata was a text analytic project examining the recurrence of terms related to immigration, migrants and refugees in Federal Government documents, including Speeches from the Throne, Minister Mandate Letters, and key Minister speeches.

I spoke today before the City of Toronto Executive Committee on the update to Quayside, and the proposed Master Innovation and Development Plan from Sidewalk Toronto. The full text of my statement on the question of “Can We Trust Alphabet & Sidewalk Toronto with Children’s Data?” is below, though my public deputation was slightly shorter:

Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to speak before you today. What I will speak to is a small segment of a larger academic study examining how big tech and entertainment conglomerates are handing children’s data and my paper on Big Data, Disney, and the Future of Children’s Entertainment was published yesterday.

To clarify – to speak to Councillor Fletcher’s question, in Canada and the US children under 13 are deemed to be minors, and cannot give consent, hence terms of use requiring parental consent on most websites. In the EU, with the enforcing of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in May 2018, all but two countries raised the age of consent to 16. the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) recognizes children as vulnerable and deserving of special considerations: they cannot make informed decisions as to what they are agreeing to. We do not have adequate legislation in Canada to regulate today’s data collection practices, generating pseudonymized consumer profiles via cross-browser fingerprinting and other methods.

Do you see children in this illustration from Sidewalk Labs? I do.

My findings on Alphabet’s subsidiary companies are alarming, well-documented internationally, and raise serious questions as to whether we can trust a big tech company to self-regulate. Alphabet’s subsidiary companies, Google, YouTube, and Google Play, have an established pattern of violating children’s data privacy due to variously:

Broadly, an (over) reliance on AI to serve ads and content recommendations;

a lack of human oversight on app developer practices in the Google Play store;

an overreach as to data collection of minors and teens via Google Chromebooks introduced in American schools in 2017 whereby account holders had to opt-out of data collection.

Let me detail two instances further:

A 2018 academic study, “Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?: Examining COPPA Compliance at Scale,” published in the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, found that “thousands of Android apps potentially violated the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act or COPPA in the US. “The study examined “5,885 child-directed Android apps from the US Play Store, which are included in Google’s Designed for Families programme, and found that “Overall, roughly 57% of the 5,855 child-directed apps that we analysed are potentially violating Coppa.” A complaint from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood to the FTC in the US expanded on how the Google Play Store apps were marketing to children and in turn, violating children’s privacy.

The consistent documented pattern across Alphabet’s companies is a failure to enforce secure data privacy for children under 13 until an external organization calls attention to violations. Why is this important for Quayside? Sidewalk Labs is a sister company to three of Alphabet’s subsidiaries, all of whom have failed to meet compliance requirements (more than once) with repeated international outcry, so there is no basis to expect that Sidewalk TO will be any more reliable as to protecting or respecting the privacy of minors.

As John Thackera stated, Trust is not an algorithm. So, can we trust companies who trust in algorithms? Based on existing documentation, we should not assume we can trust Alphabet’s Sidewalk Toronto to consistently respect the data privacy of our most vulnerable citizens, as sister companies have not in the past. Currently, so called “urban data” gathered in public spaces will scoop the data of minors and treat it as adult data, unless protections are clearly designed and executed. Clarity as to how we can ensure the consistent protection of the data privacy of children and youth must be central to our discussions of technology globally and to Justin Trudeau’s proposedDigital Charter in Canada. It behooves us to be very circumspect as to trusting Alphabet’s Sidewalk Toronto with our children’s data.

Note: The New York Times published a report, “On YouTube’s Digital Playground, an Open Gate for Pedophiles,” on Monday June 3, 2019, that AGAIN, YouTube’s algorithms are pushing child-created content to pedophiles, resulting in mass *swarm* activity in views and on the comments. The instances I referred to were from 2017 and February 2019.

The material here is a small fraction of a larger research inquiry into how major tech platforms and media conglomerates are / are not adhering to children’s privacy regulations. Primarily, COPPA in the US, Office of the Privacy Commissioner guidelines in Canada, then relevant legislation and activities in Europe pre & post GDPR, and activities in Mexico & India.

“The devices that we use have unique identifiers. With cross-browser fingerprinting, the data we generate as users isn’t as anonymized as we believe it is. The tracking of our online activity is extensive, comprehensive and persistent, and generates marketable data shadowsthat do not need our personal information in order to target us as consumers.

This should be a significant concern regarding today’s children and youth, who have extremely detailed data profiles that they will carry into adulthood, creating what Google’s Eric Schmidt termed an “indelible record.”

What is key to note here is that these instances of alleged violations of children’s privacy have occurred in the private realm, where regulations exist as to how this data should be handled. As smart city projects like Sidewalk Toronto’s Quayside project grow in profile and popularity, they have yet to identify what will happen to data generated in public by minors. Because Sidewalk Toronto may set precedents shaping future smart city planning, children’s privacy in the private and public spheres should be recognized as a national issue.

Sidewalk Toronto is a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, with several concerning precedents regarding tracking and collecting the data of minors. The findings reported here are an extension of a longer paper as to how tech and media giants are observation privacy needs of minors. “Data Science, Disney, and The Future of Children’s Entertainment” will be published in The Palgrave Handbook of Children’s Film and Television (July 2019).

Minors can’t consent

Children today face unique challenges because they will be targeted by business intelligence, and shaped by this targeting to a degree that we cannot fathom. There are legal protections for minors under 13 as stated by the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada (OPC) and Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) in the United States. Children and youth are recognized as vulnerable and deserving of special considerations: they cannot make informed decisions as to what they are agreeing to. This makes the data tracking and mining of children under 13 a federal issue….”

Having spent about two hours playing through Netflix’ Bandersnatch, what I found really interesting was the hand-holding, what that said about the presumed audience, and how that telegraphed a set of mental model references to that ‘new’ audience for interactive on a Netflix platform.

So the many references from the first CYOA to early gaming (setting the story in THAT moment of gaming) to meta-discussions re. Player agency & choice within a bounded set of possible paths.

I ask my video game course students to write a design intention statement to go with their Twine games so they think through how they want to manipulate players to do X and what they want players to feel. Bandersnatch was almost always crystal clear to me on the design intention through choice options & the progression of the story.

Stanley Parable makes this game manipulation explicit – Bioshock reveals it at the turn – and here the choice options trained you from lesser to greater consequence, with the options often telegraphing higher dramatic payout vs. lesser(significant backstory etc). Those were the options I didn’t take as I wanted to see what was designed for the ‘less’ obviously dramatic path. That that content was still engaging was a plus. I was only surprised once were the ‘lesser’ choice had a major dramatic pay-off.

Years ago – mid-2000s – there was a Brit PSA on Youtube (1st interactive with choice glow spots I think??) made to address knife violence in schools. It failed miserably because you watch a teen heading out to school & passing the kitchen knife block, up pops ‘take the knife’ or ‘leave the knife’ so you know what the vast majority of viewers did because OF COURSE you want to see the more dramatic payoff.

Bandersnatch kept forcing me back to the one significant choice I had refused though, so that got repetitive. The overall design though, in context, definitely improved on that Brit PSA – which got a LOT of press.

McLuhan’s argument also seems relevant – that the content of any new medium will be that of an established medium until it develops its own aesthetic language.

“The instance of the electric light may prove illuminating in this connection. The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the “content” of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content of the telegraph.” Marshall McLuhan. “The Medium is the Message.”

So, no surprise here, initially evoking very clear familiar genres / plot arcs & characters to ease you in. Granted interactive cinema has been around for decades (Bandersnatch solved a bunch of tech challenges we had mid-2000s with Late Fragment), however, my guess is this will be novel to millions on Netflix who get the gamer references (don’t necessarily have to be gamers) and those who will find the progression from intro cues to meta-references engaging.

AND – last thought – Bandersnatch is an experiment generating a massive amount of organic viewer / player behaviour data. What you choose, how long you play, whether you return to it, etc etc. All that user data will feed decisions as to what to do next. It’s a calling card for Netflix & for interactive producers. Does Netflix have a Director of Interactive? Who do you pitch to? I’m guessing there’s an online scramble to figure that out right now.

“In the past two years, we have seen a surfeit of articles and photos capturing the ugliness of populist demonstrations and the resurgence of white nationalism, yet this is the image that haunts me. Look at those faces. Look at those beaming smiles. The camaraderie. The light. The joy. When I studied that photo it seemed absolutely clear to me that no matter what Trump does or says, his base will support him because this is how he makes them feel.

Happy. Seen. Spoken to. Affirmed. This response is not news, as understanding the Trump base is a much discussed topic. What might be new, though, is a different way of thinking about the relationship between storytelling and the self that I’d like to share here…”

Odysseus crying at the court of the Phaeacians

“Cavarero argues that…Homer shows us our ‘desire to hear one’s own story in life’ (33). The power of the storyteller is to give us is a vision of our life in ‘the figural unity of the design’ (xxi). Our story is made manifest and confirmed in the eyes and understanding of another. We cannot do this for ourselves as ‘the story can only be narrated from the posthumous perspective of someone who did not participate in the events’ (xxii). This power of transformation and mediation is the storyteller’s gift and for Odysseus at the court of the Phaeacians, he hears how he is being remembered and he weeps.

That we need another to ‘tell me my story’ (86), to confer this understanding of ourselves narratable, a story that can and will be told emphasizes, too, the craft and vision of the storyteller. The craft involved in creating complex, meaningful, compelling, memorable stories out of the messy, dense, contradictory experiences of our everyday lives. We cannot do this for ourselves as another can.

This desire to hear our story as others conceive it is there at the end of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, when Augustus asks Hazel and Isaac to write their eulogies for a pre-funeral, as “I want to attend my funeral.” The eulogies that Hazel and Isaac read share the impact Gus has had on each of them and how each will remember him after his imminent death.

This desire for our story to be told back to us by others illuminates so many of the dynamics and consequences of online engagement and the dangers of echo-chamber isolation that have marked this year. Deeply divisive conflicts over whose story we believe. Whose story we affirm….”